


sharp-dressed man

by bellepeppertronix



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-12
Updated: 2013-08-12
Packaged: 2017-12-23 05:43:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/922670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellepeppertronix/pseuds/bellepeppertronix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the doctors aren't working, no one recognizes them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sharp-dressed man

Mako and Raleigh are walking around the city, enjoying the scenery, now that there is something to enjoy. They have just come out of a little café, her with a coconut boba smoothie and Raleigh with a bag full of laughing doughnuts, so fresh he burns himself on the first one he eats.  
“Be careful!” she says, but they are both laughing.  
It seems like everyone is laughing and smiling.  
It has been eleven months. Almost a year, she thinks, and already everything is so different. She has noticed that, finally, the ration-to-money exchange signs are beginning to disappear from shop windows, that people are again walking around with snack food in their hands instead of bulging plastic-fiber bags of canned groceries.  
She also sees something she has not seen since she was a little girl: people, sitting at tables on the sidewalk, playing cards and chess and mah jong--people finding excuses to stay outside. They pass through a tiny park built into the crater of a kaiju footprint, shrubs grown all along its margin, with cute, rickety little metal tables scattered around inside. Every one of the little tables is occupied.  
Across the street on the far side of the small park, there is a coffee shop with an old-fashioned wood-and-plaster facade, but no glass in the windows. The people inside do not seem to mind.  
The place is so near the Shatterdome that she wonders how she could possibly have missed it before. --But then she reprimands herself. She hadn't had time to even think about places like that, during the war.  
She is so engrossed with her thoughts that, for a moment, she is staring ahead without really seeing what's in front of her.  
But then she stops and stares for a moment, smoothie raised to her lips but forgotten, and then, when Raleigh stumbles into her and apologizes, she doesn't say anything--just points with one of the fingers wrapped around her cup.  
At Newt, who is sitting in the coffee-shop, animatedly talking to someone.  
He is wearing a black-and-white checkered shirt (rolled up to his elbows, of course), a bright red tie (crooked and loose, of course) and an equally bright red watch on one wrist, waving his hands as he talks.  
The man sitting opposite him laughs, too--someone she would have glanced at and made a mental note to mention to Tendo.  
He's dressed sharply, looking like he stepped off the set of a 1920s movie, in a perfectly-fitted pale gray suit over a paler lilac-gray vest and white shirt, small decorous gold watch-chain glinting from one of the buttonholes into the vest pocket. Neither of them can see enough of the other man's face, aside from the corner of the horn-rimmed glasses he's wearing, to even guess who he could be.  
"Is that..." She starts.  
"No way," Raleigh finishes.  
They look at one another, then back at Newt and the other man, and then they decide to investigate.

"So, I'm running with an, like, a _LITERAL_ armload of dead, semi-frozen frogs--the kind they used to preserve in formalin, and--okay, so you _KNOW_ how that stuff smells, right?" Newt says, his hands thrown up.  
Mako and Raleigh have found seats in the coffee shop, at a corner table, half-hidden behind a rotating postcard stand. Newt and Hermann (she wonders) are at a table by the window, a few paces down and across from them.  
She is paying closer attention to Newt, now. He's wearing red tennis shoes with rather conspicuously white toes and laces, and jeans that are so tight it looks like he waded through a pool of black paint and let it dry on his skin. One of the knees on the pants is torn to shreds that are stretched taut over the skin of his knee. Sometimes, when he gestures with his hands, he nudges the other man's foot--never his right one--with one of his.  
The other man looks like Hermann Gottlieb, if Hermann Gottlieb had a sense of style and smiled. The two things seem like such an obvious contradiction in terms that she doesn't know what to think. Surely Newt wouldn't go _that_ far out of his way--to finally make friends with Dr. Gottlieb, only to replace him with someone who looked _just_ like him?  
But no--she sees the other man touch the back of one of Newt's hands while he's waving them, and he says, "Newton, you _didn't_."  
"Yeah, I did!" Newt says, grinning.  
The doubts vanish. Hermann is laughing and trying to muffle it. He's shaking his head, covering his mouth with one hand. She can see his hair is gleaming—parted on one side and gelled back into a glossy-smooth sweep, except for one little curl over his forehead. His elbow is on the table, his cane hanging off its edge. The cane is one of the bamboo ones, varnished to an amber shine, and he's absently tapping the toe of one of the chocolate colored matte-leather oxfords he's wearing against its end.  
"So my grandmother is calling me, 'Newton, mein liebling, where are you?' and I'm running back and forth in my room trying to find a place to hide them where they won't ooze when they start to thaw--"  
Hermann can't stifle the laugh anymore. When he smiles like that, the corners of his eyes turn up and he has crows' feet and Mako is honestly startled. She's known him for years and never once seen him look like this.  
He's handsome, though, she can see now. When he's gotten some sun and isn't wrung dry by too much caffeine, too much work, and too little sleep, she thinks, he looks about ten years younger--and much better.  
She looks over at Raleigh, who is holding her smoothie and pretending to drink it, stirring it while staring at them.  
"That _is_ Hermann Gottlieb, right? The...the guy who smiles, like, once a year?" he whispers to her, in Japanese.  
She nods, feigning paying attention to her tablet. The doodle of Danger she is doing is getting really thick around the outlines, the only places she's really touching.  
"Why did you steal them in the first place? Weren't you going to dissect one in class anyway?" they hear Hermann ask.  
"Well, _yeah_ , but holy shit, like the _rest_ of the kids were gonna appreciate them? Hell no! So I stuffed as many into my lunchbox as I could hide in there--you know, to keep 'em cold--and stuck my lunchbox in my backpack, so--but I _knew_ I couldn't leave them in there, so I'm running around my room--"  
Hermann is laughing again, eyes gleaming, and Mako has given up on not staring.  
Happy is a good look for him, she thinks.  
She glances again at Raleigh, who is also staring, mouth on the straw.  
"Hey. Let's go to that potsticker stall I was telling you about. I'm pretty sure that actually is Dr. Gottlieb." she murmurs. This is starting to feel too strange.  
But Raleigh says, "Hang on. I wanna hear the rest of the story."  
"...already unscrewed the grate for the air duct that ran into my room--it was an older house, one of the ones where the vents were in the floor and they opened into that, you know, the little box-under-the-floorboards."  
Hermann's eyes are wide, his face incredulous and amused. "Newton, _NO_."  
"Hermann, _YES_! I was _twelve_ , it seemed like a great hiding place! So I shove the grate aside and just stuff all the poor little fuckers in there---okay, i was really careful, actually--and I can _hear_ her coming up the stairs, and I'm just like, 'Oh shit, oh, shit, she's gonna see them and make me throw 'em away, oh shit'. And _right_ as she opens the door, I flip the grate closed and slide my backpack over it. So when _she_ comes in, all she sees is me fiddling with my backpack."  
Hermann sits back, mouth a crooked smile. "Why am I absolutely certain that this doesn't end well?"  
"Duh, of course not. Let me get to the _really_ bad part." Newt is grinning, excited, gesturing as he speaks. "So she says, 'What's that strange smell?' And I say--" Newt interrupts himself, laughing, "'Sorry, Grandma, we're doing science experiments at school and I spilled some stuff on my backpack.' And we're in my room, and she's like, 'Oh, well, I'm making dessert--spice cookies! And I need a young man with very strong arms to stir the cookie dough!' So I'm like, 'Suuure, Grandma!' BUT THEN SHE DOESN'T LEAVE. She just waits for me to go downstairs with _her_. So I had to leave all the frogs there!"  
"Hey," someone says, to Mako's right, and when she looks up, Tendo is standing there, in a dark blue chambray shirt with sleeves rolled past his elbows, red suspenders, and stovepipe jeans. She wonders where he got the white ankle-boots he's wearing, or if he's had them this entire time, secreted away in a footlocker somewhere. His hair is immaculate, as always, but the first two buttons on the shirt are undone, revealing the neckline of a white t-shirt and more of the elaborate scrolling words tattooed on his neck. He is smiling, summer tan darkening his skin. She thinks, absently, that everyone looks better now that they have time and can rest, but of course, she realizes--isn't that the point?  
"I thought that was you two," he says. "Mind if I join you?"  
"Of course not! Please, sit down!" she says. Raleigh shuffles his chair a little to the side, awkwardly, and makes room for him behind the card rack.  
When he sits down, he follows Raleigh's glance sideways, to the last booth, and then he looks back at them and nudges Raleigh with his elbow.  
"Hey. Is that...?"  
"Yeah," Raleigh says.  
"Wow," Tendo says, impressed, "I need to ask Dr. Gottlieb who does his tailoring. That is one hell of a nice suit."

**Author's Note:**

> This was a fill for an LJ kinkmeme prompt:  
> http://pacificrimkink.livejournal.com/1613.html?thread=1873485
> 
> I hope you enjoyed reading it!


End file.
